The overall goal is to develop a comprehensive assessment of nutritional relationships to blood pressure in older Americans. Data from the second National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES-II) will be analyzed for all relevent relationships between nutritional variables and systolic and diastolic blood pressure. Non-nutritional variables will also be analyzed to place the influence of nutritional variables in perspective. Special attention will be directed to persons aged 55-74 years and the nutritional relationships found in this age group will be compared to those occurring in younger adults aged 20-54 years. The edited files will be processed initially for general descriptive purposes by the statistical software available within MIDAS. Subsequently, the OSIRIS software package developed at the University of Michigan Survey Research Center will be utilized to evaluate the most promising relationships with greater rigor and validity. Since the NHANES II data were obtained from a complex, multistage probability sample survey3, hypothesis testing and model parameter estimation must be conducted with a statistical analysis framework which incorporates the sampling weights and the effects of the clustered design. The biases introduced by the deliberate oversampling of target subgoups, differential nonresponse and clustered selection will be adjusted for by using analytic strategies. Analysis of variance, multiple regression and analysis of cross-classified contingency tables will be implemented within this general framework. Nutritional influences will be compared between younger and older adults. Because other non-nutritional factors have been considered in the analysis, the relative importance of nutritional factors in older adults will be placed in perspective. These results will provide a comprehensive picture of nutritional relationships to blood pressure in a representative sample of older Americans and identify potential avenues for non-pharmacologic prevention and intervention for high blood pressure.